AMD Microservers To Power Verizon Terremark's Cloud Services

AMD's SeaMicro servers will be the brains behind Verizon Terremark's new Infrastructure-as-a Service cloud offering, AMD said Monday. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said an undisclosed number of its 512-core SeaMicro servers were deployed to Verizon.

The news is a big win for up-and-coming microservers, which are an alternative to traditional servers and are characterized by hundreds of cores woven together into a single system using a fraction of the power and space. AMD said it worked with Verizon Terremark to co-develop hardware and software technology on the SM15000 server.

Verizon Terremark Friday unveiled its public cloud infrastructure offerings, Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage. CRN reported last week that Verizon's new cloud offering will be the company's first effort to compete with major public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft's Windows Azure.

"The technology we developed turns the cloud paradigm upside down," said Andrew Feldman, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager, server, in a prepared statement. Feldman said SeaMicro servers enable Verizon Terremark to offer cloud services an enterprise can configure and control as if the equipment were in its own data center.

Feldman founded SeaMicro in 2007, and it was acquired in May 2012 by AMD for $334 million. Feldman's SeaMicro is credited with pioneering microserver technology. Microservers are described as servers that use multiple mobile low-power processors and take up less space, allowing companies to fit more nodes into a single data farm -- thereby reducing cooling costs.

According to market researchers at MarketsandMarkets, microservers now account for 2.3 percent of the market. However, in the next five years they are expected to reach 25 percent to 30 percent of the global server market, worth an estimated $26.5 billion by 2018, according to the research firm.

For its part, Verizon Terremark said it's still using a variety of computing platforms for its data centers. But, it believes SeaMicro servers are the best fit for its Verizon Cloud and storage needs. "Our collaboration with AMD enabled us to develop revolutionary technology, and it represents the backbone of our future plans," said John Considine, chief technology officer at Verizon Terremark.

Those technologies include giving companies more control of their infrastructure and providing speed and flexibility of a public cloud offering with the performance and security of an enterprise-grade cloud, Considine said in a prepared statement.